My abridged teaching statement and teaching history can be found here. For teaching history, go the bottom of this page. Please contact me if interested in seeing my full length teaching statement or much longer teaching portfolio.
Teaching Statement
My approach to teaching is to foster an environment in which students can express their beliefs and reflect on their own thinking. I consider this to be what it means to do philosophy. My goal as an educator is not just to get students to be able to recall what various figures say about given topics but, instead, to be able to grapple with those hard questions themselves. Philosophy should aim to enable students to engage the deep questions of what they value and how they seek to live. Navigating disputes, especially abstract ones, only comes with sincere practice and effort.
I believe philosophy is at its best when it is honest and sincere. I find this is something professional philosophers end up taking for granted sometimes: we end up becoming very direct about what we believe, especially with one another. This is not so obvious for the vast majority of students—a few times a semester I will have a student explicitly say something to me along the lines of “I’ve never had a class that invited me to think for myself like this.” Every time a student says something like that, I am reminded of why I fell in love with philosophy in the first place.
Teaching History
Instructor of Record (Indiana University):
Philosophy and the Environment (Spring 2024, Fall 2023)
Environmentalism and Extremes (Spring 2023)
Business & Morality (Fall 2022)
Assistant, Grading and Discussion (Indiana University):
Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2022, Tarasenko-Struc)
Biomedical Ethics* (Fall 2021, Robison, *grading only)
Environmental Ethics (Spring 2021, Adams)
Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2020, O’Connor)
Introduction to Philosophy (Spring 2020, Leite)
Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2019, Robison)
Joshua Paschal 